The pleasures of poor product design

(inconspicuous.info)

43 points | by NaOH 3 hours ago

7 comments

  • bcherry 2 hours ago
    this really reminds me of the "worst volume control" from reddit https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world...
  • userbinator 54 minutes ago
    IC: With AI getting bigger and more controversial and so on, have you used AI to create any of these designs?

    That is an interesting point to bring up, because this type of "almost but not quite right" is exactly what AI seems to naturally create.

  • ChrisMarshallNY 1 hour ago
    I’ve always enjoyed the “useless teapot” that Don Norman has on the cover of DOET: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61KtiLw7BtL...
    • drfloyd51 14 minutes ago
      I believe it is actually called: The masochist’s teapot.

      I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in design. Even today it is fantastic.

  • eszed 1 hour ago
    What's wrong about the glasses? I've been staring at them and trying to figure out why they're unworkable, as opposed to just a quirky pair of specs.
    • jaden 1 hour ago
      The sharp angle of the bridge would dig into your nose.
    • parallel 1 hour ago
      Pointy bit on the bridge of the nose.
    • starmole 1 hour ago
      the sharp point on the bridge is going to hurt your snout.
  • Gigachad 1 hour ago
    I love that these are all fairly beautiful, stuff you'd really love to have if it wasn't fundamentally unusable.
  • jrmg 2 hours ago
    Now I’m wondering how you could create ‘uncomfortable’ versions of simple command line tools (ls, cat, more etc.) or perhaps shells.

    Emacs and/or vi, depending on your inclination, have text editors covered already, of course ;-)

    • II2II 7 minutes ago
      Well, bash offers vi and Emacs as editing modes. We're already covered on that front. Many of the parameters for ls are cryptic, making it awkward to use for anything other than routine tasks without referencing the man page. more is so limited that many people choose to use a program used to concatenation files (cat) as a file viewer. Those who don't want to reach for their mouse to use their terminal's scrollbar buffer will use less, since it does more than more. Don't bother parsing that last sentence with bison, unless you have a yacc to shave.
  • keithnz 2 hours ago
    given the title, so may software developers must be living in bliss! /s